Myparty Worm Spreading Quickly

A new mass-mailing worm hit the Internet on Sunday and has begun spreading rapidly.

The new worm is known as Myparty.A and arrives as an e-mail with the subject line “New photos from my party!”

The body of the message reads as follows:

“Hello! My party…It was absolutely amazing! I have attached my web page with new photos! If you can please make color prints of my photos. Thanks”

There is an attachment named www.myparty.yahoo.com, which does not point to any Web page and is instead a disguised executable file. When executed, the file uses its own SMTP engine to mail itself to everyone in the infected PCs Microsoft Outlook address book.

The Myparty worm continued to spread rapidly throughout the day Monday as users in the United States arrived at work and found copies of it in their mailboxes. Researchers discovered late in the day that in addition to mailing copies of itself to multiple users, the worm also installs a Trojan on machines running Windows NT, 2000 or XP. As of 4:30 p.m. EST Monday, MessageLabs Ltd., a U.K.-based company that tracks virus activity, had stopped more thn 9,000 copies of Myparty.A.

Symantec Corp., the Cupertino, Calif., security vendor, gave Myparty.A a severity rating of three on a five-point scale.